Chekhov's Platonov, written when he was 20, is an untidy beast that several writers, including Michael Frayn and David Hare, have successfully tamed. But this new version, adapted and directed by Helena Kaut-Howson, acknowledges the work's raw energy. Although the cast is British, this is a deeply Slavic production filled with behavioural detail, restless movement and brutal candour.

Kaut-Howson's most radical decision is to update the action from the 1880s to modern Russia. Her argument is that the sense of lost chances that followed the liberation of the serfs is mirrored by the confusion of post-Soviet society. She may well be right, but, however much Platonov inveighs against the millionaires who have replaced the old communist stooges, I don't feel that is the play's mainspring. What Chekhov provides in Platonov is a tragi-comic portrait of the superfluous man: in this case a ragingly articulate schoolteacher whose volatile despair proves fatally attractive to women. He is not so much a Don Juan as a man whose sardonic intelligence turns him into an unwitting sex object.

That, in turn, breeds a self-disgust, which is the key to Jack Laskey's brilliant performance. This shabby, unshaven figure, who looks as if he hasn't slept for several weeks, not only sees through everyone, more crucially he sees through himself. When he cries, "Other men wrestle with questions of Earth-shattering importance, I am exercised by the question which skirt to chase", you hear the Chekhovian note of self-aware absurdity. I just hope Laskey goes on to play some of drama's other great, guilt-haunted anti-heroes such as Hamlet and Jimmy Porter.

He is surrounded by a tip-top cast, including Susie Trayling as a rich widow who is more than a match for Platonov, Marianne Oldham as a married ice-maiden only too eager to thaw and Jade Williams as an angrily litigious feminist. Occasionally there is a bit too much "acting" going on, but this is an extraordinary production, moving to London's Arcola in May, that feels as if it might have hailed from eastern Europe and that vividly shows public anarchy spreading to private relationships.

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